Joan of Arc (9 page)

Even after the army was fed, there was the problem of persuading the people of Troyes to open their doors to Charles. Neither Brother Richard nor the bishop was succeeding. Joan was allowed to present her case. She knelt to the king and the bishop of Rheims and said, “Noble Dauphin, command young people to come and besiege the city of Troyes and drag out your debates no longer for in God's name, within three days I will lead you into the city of Troyes, by love, force, or courage, and that false Burgundy will be quite thunderstruck.”
⁶

Once again, Joan's certainty and strength of tone prevailed, and the bishop allowed her to start a siege if she could guarantee that she would be successful in six days. She guaranteed it, and made such good strategic decisions about the placement of artillery that the military men were astonished.

When she began her attack, the citizens of Troyes panicked, and within a day they were bargaining with the king, agreeing to terms that were favorable to him. Joan entered the city to prepare for the king's ceremonial entry, placing archers to line the streets. She rode beside the king, carrying the standard, accompanied by the principal captains in all their finery. In addition to planning and taking part in the procession, Joan agreed to act as godmother to a baby who was born that day.

There are two conflicting reports on Joan at Troyes. An Anglo-Burgundian soldier said she was “the simplest thing he ever saw, and in what she did there was neither rhyme nor reason, any more than the stupidest thing he ever saw. He thought that she was not to be compared with Madame d'Or, the female jester of the duke of Burgundy, who was famous for her long blonde hair.”
⁷

Responding to Joan very differently, other eyewitnesses claimed that they had seen thousands of white butterflies flying around her standard. The discrepancy is an early example of the range of response Joan's complex character could elicit.

There was feeling among the citizenry of Rheims that they should wait to see what the duke of Burgundy had to offer them before they opened their gates to Charles. So there was some delay in his entering the city. He finally entered the city on a Saturday; the customary day for coronation was Sunday. This meant that the ceremony had to be planned quickly, and as a result it lacked some of the grandeur that had always gone with the coronation of the kings of France. The habitual coronation regalia was unavailable, since it was kept at St.-Denis, near Paris, still in English hands. Nevertheless, at 3 A.M., Charles entered the cathedral for the traditional vigil before he was knighted, and at nine the ritual began.

Notre Dame de Rheims would have been the second great cathedral Joan had seen. She had prayed for assistance at St. Croix d'Orléans and then triumphantly offered thanks there for her great victory. Orléans was, however, a minor structure compared to Notre Dame de Rheims, one of the great architectural marvels of the world. It is unlikely, though, that Joan's attention would have traveled to the façade or to any of the other twenty-three hundred major statues, celebrating everything from the visitation of the Virgin to the slaughtering of a pig during harvest time. She would probably not have noticed the famous stone angel at the church door, that enigmatic smiler, ironic, accepting, merciful but commonsensical, a face that both mirrors Joan's best qualities and is bemused by the hint of extremism that she represents. But Joan's sense of drama must have been aroused by the majestic vaulting of the great nave down which she walked, her armor covered with a tunic of white silk, the only female in the procession, the only member neither clerical nor noble, and the youngest of them all.

There were important irregularities in the ceremony, which mirrored contemporary political irregularities. Of the twelve peers of France who were supposed to stand forwardfor the king, most sent substitutes. One of the absent peers was the duke of Burgundy, Charles's sworn enemy. Another missing person was Pierre Cauchon, archbishop of Beauvais, the strongest French supporter of the English and the future presider at Joan's trial.

But the most striking anomaly was the presence of a young woman, a commoner. Throughout the whole ceremony, Joan stood beside the king, holding her standard. At her trial, Joan was asked why her standard was unfurled in the cathedral when those of the other captains were excluded. With her characteristic pride she answered, “It had borne the burden, and it was right that it should have the honor.”
⁸

Joan's response to the coronation was, again characteristically, emotionally expressive. She knelt, embraced the king's knees, and wept, assuring the king that he was indeed king of France now and that her prophecies had been fulfilled.

Despite the short notice of the coronation, the city was overwhelmed with crowds; the vines planted in the surrounding fields were trampled by the throngs of horses. Among the visitors were Joan's father and her uncle, Durand Laxault, who had been her first supporter. They lingered for two months in the city, enjoying what must have been the only holiday of their lives.

On the day of the coronation, Joan found time to dictate a letter to the duke of Burgundy. She addressed him with taunting arrogance. She told him that, as the king's vassal, he should know that his duty was to make a lasting peace with the king and that if he wanted to go to war, he should fight the Saracens. She threatened him:

Joan left the city of Rheims at the height of her power and success. She suggested that, her mission to crown the king having been completed, it was time for her to go home to Domrémy. Had she followed this impulse, she would have experienced only success and might have died in bed, a local legend. But she wanted to go on to Paris, and she believed that the king wanted the same thing.

Clearly, however, she and Charles had different goals. It is difficult to understand Charles favorably or, rather, to put him in any kind of nonexculpatory light. History has not been kind to him; it has painted him as a coward and a dupe. Certainly his behavior toward Joan is an example of crashing disloyalty; as soon as he was crowned, he seemed, at best, to lose interest in the woman who had crowned him. Many Joanolaters feel that he undermined her best efforts. Certainly he was invisible when she was in her most dire need.

From a political standpoint, however, Charles was, in the long run, a success. He died with the French crown still on his head, ruling over a united France. His enemies had lost their sway, and if he betrayed Joan in life, he saw to it—for his own reasons, of course—that her name was, in death, glorified.

To make a rather weak defense for him, the Joan whom he thought he was signing up at Chinon was not the person he had to confront after the coronation. At the center of a court paralyzed by a consistent low-grade depression, he was presented with a boy/girl on horseback who assured him of his legitimacy and whose energy and faith raised his dormant hopes. In equipping her and sending her to his demoralized army, he might have thought he was investing in a curiosity, someone who would be of temporary use and then disappear—or go home.

But the victory in Orléans and the coronation strengthened Joan's position as a figure whose source of power was only partly mythical. People flocked to her; she was a legend who prompted popular action. Because of her, Charles had a larger army than ever, and one his scant resources could hardly support. Having triumphed at Orléans, Joan was convinced of her own status as
chef de guerre
and of her right to take her place beside the great captains of the French army. She did not remain in the place Charles had wanted her to occupy.

Charles and Joan illustrate a phenomenon that occurs when young women want to move from the realm of the symbolic, where male imagination has placed them, to the realm of the actual, where they want to be. A girl can be an ornament, but if she wants to act rather than be looked at, if she wants scope and autonomy rather than the static fate of the regarded, even the well-regarded, object, she becomes dangerous. Joan had not changed; she was, rather, misread. And for this misreading, for which she was not responsible except, perhaps, in failing to understand that other people lacked her courage and her tenacity of vision, she would be punished, at the very least by a loss of favor.

It seems that the appetite for combat that Charles displayed when he equipped Joan to go to Orléans was quickly sated. Perhaps he only wanted a token victory; in any case, he certainly did not share Joan's unequivocal determination to take Paris by force. Charles associated Paris with bad things; in 1418 he had escaped with his life when the Burgundians took over the city. It was a devastating defeat, a massacre in which nearly five thousand people were killed.

Charles understood, perhaps better than Joan, the shaky situation of his finances and the consequences this would have on an army for which he would have to provide. A move to capture Paris would require a major capital outlay, and capital was what he did not have. This was one motivation for his desire to negotiate with Burgundy rather than to confront him militarily. His source of wealth, de la Trémoille, was of the party of negotiation; certainly this would have influenced Charles. And it would make sense that he might have felt some residual guilt in the murder of the father of the duke of Burgundy, a guilt that could have diluted his ardor for full-scale pursuit.

None of these considerations held any sway with Joan. She seems not to have cared, or not to have noticed, that she was pursuing a policy that her beloved king did not wholeheartedly support. For her, the capture of Paris had a mystical significance. It was part of her three-point plan—she would take Orléans, crown the king, and march to Paris—a plan that had been spelled out for her by her voices. She knew what she wanted, and Charles wasn't sure. His own desires weren't clear to him; the problems with Joan's policy were.

Not only could he see the problems with her plans; her attitude was also troubling. She wasn't showing the deference to him and his advisers that her emotional protestations and gestures of loyalty might have suggested. Her letter to the duke of Burgundy on the day of coronation was written without consultation with Charles and his counselors and in a tone bound to make negotiation more difficult. Joan's understanding of the shape that her loyalty to the king would have to take seems a bit ill considered, half-digested, immature. A large part of loyalty to a sovereign must include obeying his wishes and making him look good. This seems never to have entered Joan's mind. She knew what needed to be done; he was the king, but she had her voices.

Even as Charles was making a triumphal march toward Paris, he was negotiating with Burgundy. Less than a month after he was crowned in Rheims, he had signed a two-week truce with Burgundy, on terms that were, according to Joan's supporters, far from favorable to him. Joan's response to this truce in her letter to the citizens of Rheims reveals her unhappiness with Charles's policy and her inability to do anything about it. It is a sign at once of her undiminished sense of her own authority and her frustration at being unable to act upon it.

This is a remarkable document from a subject who had only a few days before knelt and embraced the king's knees. Her words, and their tone, make clear that she had no hesitation in publicly expressing her problems with royal policy. Obviously, this would never be a wise move for someone whose position was dependent on the favor of the king. But the wisdom of the world was something that was of no interest to Joan; she seems to have lacked any impulse toward self-protection or calculation of a policy that would safeguard her position.

The letter is also a sign of Joan's pleasure in combat and her focus on military action as the important way changes in policy are made. It makes more poignant the question of what could have happened to Joan if she hadn't been burned; life in Domrémy would have been impossible for her. Perhaps for her, as well as for our collective imagination, it was preferable that she go out in a blaze. Her unhappiness living in Charles's court in the months when he wouldn't allow her to go into battle suggests that she could only be herself leading men into battle; any other life would be insufficient.

Joan's radical independence was difficult enough for Charles to bear when Joan was having success in battle. But then she began to lose. Because he had no real personal loyalty to her, because he was interested in her only in what she could represent, when her representations failed to be of use to him, she ceased to exist as important or, perhaps, even real.

Joan's relations with Charles are a metaphor for the problem she could not resolve—the conflict between the mythical and the actual. It is as if she were riding in a chariot drawn by two horses. The chariot could move with breathtaking speed and sureness as long as the two horses kept the same pace, as they did at Orléans, when the myth of the conquering virgin came together with the actuality of the victorious soldier. Her army, successful and well fed, could love both the idea of her and what she had accomplished. But when the gap began to widen between what she suggested or promised and what she could achieve, when the actual outran the mythical, the chariot was overturned, with no possible outcome but disaster.